


Hold Tight

by tielan



Series: Fire And Ice: MCU Jaeger AU [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, this isn't the happy ending you're looking for, trope: character in distress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 08:32:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12272742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: Pepper reaches out to grab Maria as they reach the gurney. Now that she’s had time to calm down, to focus on something other than herself, she can feel the other woman’s emotional fragility beneath the professional shell. She wishes there was something she could do, but words desert her and this moment with all the other personnel around them isn’t private.





	Hold Tight

**Author's Note:**

> For my [2015-2016 Ladies Bingo card](https://tielan.dreamwidth.org/866304.html) prompt "Australia" and my [2017 Trope Bingo card](https://tielan.dreamwidth.org/1036734.html) prompt "Free Space (Character In Distress)".

The Chinook is an unfamiliar roar and bluster, compared to the smooth and quiet flights Pepper is accustomed to taking. She’s not about to complain of the transport, though – not after the week she’s endured.

They said Australia was inhospitable; that you’d have to be mad to live here what with all the things trying to kill you. But whenever Pepper imagined things in Australia trying to kill her, they tended to be in terms of spiders and snakes, maybe a really hungry dingo. Not _people_.

She tugs the blanket the Jumphawks gave her more firmly around her, but her fingers have no grip, and it falls from her grasp.

Slim fingers snag the edge of the blanket and wind it carefully around her hand, the fingers folding warmly around Pepper’s shaking hands. A moment later, Maria sits down beside her, shoulder to shoulder, a comforting pressure. “You belted in? We didn’t come all this way to get you just for you to fall out on the way home.”

The tone and the warmth helps as much as the grip: firm and reassuring, but leaving enough space for Pepper to shift away if she wants.

She doesn’t want to shift away. She wants to lean in, to be reassured by the solidity of the other woman – by the fact that Maria came out to help search for Pepper and argued her way onto both Jumphawk rescue team and the chopper, although she’d got problems of her own and a job that needs her.

“You okay?”

“Just cold.”

There’s a lot in there – not merely her shivering state, but the exhaustion of the last few days, kidnapped by a biophysicist she trusted, tortured by a madman, held up as the ‘whore of Babylon’ to the _kaiju_ worshippers...

“The adrenaline’s wearing off,” Maria says gently. “Can I get you another blanket?”

_Yes,_ Pepper thinks. Only what she wants is less a blanket and more human warmth. But that’s not something you can just say to a casual friend. She might have asked it of Tony, but Tony’s on duty over in LA right now, and there’s really no-one else—

Beside her, Maria pulls out another blanket and slides it around Pepper. Only rather than withdrawing back to her own seat, she curls her arm around Pepper’s shoulders in a hug.

Pepper glances at the other woman, startled by the gesture, and meets a compassion that she badly needs right now. So she leans in, accepting what’s being offered in the face of the cold shivers she swallows down and the twisting in her belly that tries to drown her in nauseous waves.

Relying on someone else’s emotional kindness is new. As fiercely as she loves Tony, he’s not the most emotionally reliable of men. Feelings are not something that the billionaire-industrialist-come-Jaeger-pilot deals with very well. Pepper’s well aware that as easily as he faces her anger, her tears terrify him and he tried to make everything _better_ without realising that what she wants is _comforting_. And while, a part of her is angry that he didn’t come with the Jumphawks, she’s also glad that he didn’t. Right now, she couldn’t cope with his emotional overload as well as her own.

At least Maria’s comfort comes without the requirement that everything be made right, that the problem be solved. Some things can’t be made right.

Concentrating on her breathing helps, as does the steady, matching breathing of the woman beside her, the fragile warmth between them holding her fast and easing the tremors in her body. There’ll be more hell to pay later, when they touch down and the world rushes back in, but right now, Pepper can rest against Maria and be grateful for a friend.

Her sense of time is all screwed up, such that she’s not sure how long it’s been when someone says that there’s the mountains, and they’re thirty minutes away from the Shatterdome. One of the pilots twists in his seat to look at Maria and Pepper and when he sees them, lifts an eyebrow.

“How’s she doing?”

“Warmer and calmer,” Maria says in answer to the question directed at her. She looks down at Pepper. “There’ll be PPDC medics to look you over, and your regular doctor is coming in, but she’ll be liaising by satlink on the chopper.”

“Thank you.”

The head of the Jumphawk team snorts. “Thank your boyfriend. He’s the one who pulled all the strings.”

Pepper blinks, the reality of the operation coming to her then – all the manpower, all the firepower, all the effort that they went to for one—

“It wasn’t just for you.” Maria speaks to Pepper but it sounds like she’s addressing the Jumphawk team in the chopper, too. “The growing support of the church of the _kaiju_ has concerned the PPDC for some time now; authorising your retrieval also meant having a reason to go in against an organisation that’s been skirting close to religious terrorism for the last few years.”

The answer helps Pepper relax a little, until she notices the looks that several of the Jumphawks are giving her and Maria as she huddles under Maria’s arm. A smothered smirk, a few twitching frowns, and a couple of curled lips. Her body starts shivering again – she can’t control it.

“Can we hurry it up? She’s still shocky.”

“It’ll be ten minutes at most, but we’ll call ahead. They’ll have a mediteam on the pad.”

It feels longer than twenty minutes – or maybe it doesn’t. Pepper only clearly recalls the last five minutes as they make the descent, when Maria has to go back to her own seat and strap in. Then they’re down on solid ground, the engines are easing back, and the door is being pulled open so that the medical personnel can approach.

Beyond them, Pepper glimpses the crowd of paparazzi and reporters, cameras out, mics ready. The questions are already being shouted, a deafening cacophony of syllables, garbled beyond recognition. Then there’s someone in the door, and there’s too many people. Too many people, too close, and she doesn’t know any of them, she can’t trust any of them—

She clutches at Maria who gives her one look, then turns to speak out the door. “She wants to walk to the gurney on her own steam, Bets.”

The doctor – young, brunette, surprisingly pretty – climbs into the chopper. Her gaze flicks over Pepper. “Can you?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Bets’ mouth purses.

“Give her the chance to find out,” Maria suggests and jerks her head at the Jumphawk commander. “Get your guys out and to cleanup, Mike. And ask someone out there to pass a fleece in. She’ll want one if she’s going out in that wind.”

The jumphawks file out as Dr. Bets checks Pepper’s pulse, temperature, and blood pressure. “You’re probably still a bit shocky,” she concludes. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

Pepper’s sure. “If nothing else, it’ll give the paparazzi something to chew on.”

“Sorry to say, but I don’t think they’re here solely for you.”

She looks at Maria. Maria’s expression closes up, and Pepper abruptly realises she’s been so focused on her own situation that she never thought to ask Maria—

“How’s Steve doing?”

The flicker of frustration across Maria’s face says everything. She glances at Dr. Bets, who turns to look away, and then at the cockpit where the pilots are chatting with someone in Shatterdome LOCCENT. She lowers her voice, barely audible over the sound of the chopper engines idling. “We broke up.”

“Oh, Maria, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, well, so am I.” The fleece is passed in and Maria helps Pepper into it. “Ready to go?”

Pepper takes a deep breath and lets Maria and Dr. Bets help her up. Dr. Bets goes out first to prep the medical crews, and carefully – feeling stiffer and creakier than she ever has before – Pepper follows with Maria helping her along.

The shouting from the reporters is lost in the blowing wind, which whistles off the headlands and whips through the skeletal limbs of the eucalypts that spear empty branches at the sky at the edge of the Shatterdome grounds.

Right now, the danger Pepper feels is rather more present in the crowd of people shouting at her from the sidelines, demanding answers, wanting their soundbyte to be endlessly rehashed and picked apart on social media and the internet. She takes slow and careful steps, ignoring the camera flashes and the snatches of questions that she hears before they’re torn away in the wind. She looks up at Maria.

“I’m sorry, I never even asked about Steve...”

“You had other things on your brain.” Maria sounds off-hand, but after a moment, she murmurs, “He hasn’t been the same since the fight against the _kaiju_ Resshahebi. Losing Bucky broke something in him and I can’t...I can’t fix him.”

Her voice shakes a little and Pepper leans in a little, giving subtle support.

“Wasn’t he Drifting with Barnes when Barnes died?” Pepper seen the reports, seen the Drift statistics – both the published ones, and the ones that don’t get talked about outside of the PPDC. She knows the damage that can be done when one pilot dies while they’re Drifting and it’s a recurring nightmare of hers – Tony or Rhodey lost, and the other one left a haggard shell of the partnership they used to have. “You can’t ‘fix’ that, Maria. And nobody expects you to.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think Steve does.” Maria glances up at the sky. “The Drift psychs were working with him for a while, but there’s not much they can do when half of him’s gone. And I’m not—He doesn’t need me. I can’t...anchor him the way Bucky did – I never could. And I think I was making it worse because he wanted me to and I couldn’t—” She breaks off as they approach the Shatterdome entrance and the gurney where the PPDC medical team are waiting for them. “We’ll talk later, okay? I need to debrief the mission to Marshal Gregory.”

Pepper reaches out to grab Maria as they reach the gurney. Now that she’s had time to calm down, to focus on something other than herself, she can feel the other woman’s emotional fragility beneath the professional shell. She wishes there was something she could do, but words desert her and this moment with all the other personnel around them isn’t private. “Thanks, Maria.”

“You’re welcome, Pepper.” The smile is small but grateful and real. Then Maria turns away and Dr. Bets and the PPDC medical personnel move in around her, and Pepper forces herself to relax into their care.

* * *

Pepper wakes to the ping of the message from Rhodey sometime after midnight.

_Hey Pepper. Are you anywhere near Maria? She’s going to need a friend._

Considering Rhodey spoke with her earlier and said nothing about Maria, that text sounds ominous.

_Rhodey, what’s happened?_

She only has to wait a few seconds before the response arrives.

_Not mine to tell, but it’s bad. Would probably be best if you could find Maria._

Pepper’s in one of the VIP suites after being thoroughly vetted by what feels like every medical person in the Shatterdome, and ‘debriefing’ half the PPDC military personnel on the what _kaiju_ worshippers said while she was their prisoner , before finally being segregated by Dr. Betsy Ross and told to sleep.

She stares at the message for a moment, then eases herself out of bed to get dressed. If Rhodey woke her now to ask her to find Maria, it’s serious.

As she pulls on warm clothing, Pepper wonders what’s happened. Maria seemed fine this afternoon – or, at least, not inclined to lose it, however painful her break-up with Steve was. ‘Fine’ is probably not the word for covering over any emotional scarring with a professional demeanour, but it’s something that Pepper is intimately familiar with in Tony.

Pulling her door shut, Pepper suddenly realises the stupidity of what she’s about to do – go looking for a woman who has an entire Shatterdome’s worth of places to hide, and maybe half a Shatterdome’s worth of people to care about her. There’s no logical reason for her to imagine that Maria’s not safely stashed away and in good hands...

And yet...

An indefinable conviction pulls Pepper through the corridors of the Shatterdome, into the cool evening, and out towards the memorial grove situated at the end of the headlands, looking out to sea.

Unlike most Shatterdomes, Sydney was build in the city’s badlands, on the side of the harbour that was hardest hit by Scissure, back in ‘16. Legend has it, it was designed so the PPDC would look out over the south side of the harbour and the people they now protected, over the dead and destroyed north – a wasteland tainted by _kaiju_ blue and radioactive isotopes, and out to the Pacific Ocean from where the _kaiju_ come.

Halfway down the path to the memorial grove, Pepper is again hit by how stupid this is – a wild goose chase. And yet her instincts lead her on, boots crunching on the gravel.

She finds Maria sitting in one of the little alcoves cut into the rock – huddled, in fact, with her feet tucked up, a heavy coat around her shoulders.

By the dim pathlights of the grove, tear-trails gleam on her cheeks.

“Oh,” Pepper says, and fits herself into the niche next to Maria, putting an arm around the other woman’s shoulders. “Oh, Maria.”

It briefly occurs to her that Maria probably doesn’t want this kind of comfort – why else did she come all the way out here if not for solitude? Then it doesn’t matter what Maria came out here for, because the younger woman turns her face into Pepper’s shoulder and begins shaking with broken, desperate sobs.

Pepper thinks of Rhodey’s words, _she’s going to need a friend_ , and holds Maria tighter.

The ping of a text message arriving rings clear and electronic above the crash of the waves below, and the rustle of the wind in the trees, and Pepper automatically glances down at the phone in Maria’s hand, where another text has arrived alongside a slew of others. She glimpses names – Rhodey, Akela, Melinda, Carol, Fury – and then Steve’s name on the most recently-arrived one and the text of the message itself:

_Call me, Maria. I’m sorry. Please call me._

Maria doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge the text, and the tears don’t stop. So Pepper simply holds tight and blinks hard at the sting of her own eyes in the cold wind.

 


End file.
